Compromising

When Ayden woke from his nap today he was in a cuddly mood. Since he took a late nap, I was needing to get dinner started but he did not want me to put him down. We don't babywear as much as we used to but I needed to multi task so I put Ayden in the Ergo hip hold and got dinner started.

He snuggled in and asked, "wasat?" for all of the ingredients. It was a fun change from his learning tower because he was seeing everything from my perspective. When he was finally ready to get down and play a little he pulled me over to the closet where I keep his sensory bin. He asked for his "sice" (aka rice) and I braced myself. EVERY other time that he has asked to get his rice down, when we weren't able to, ended in an epic tantrum. I calmly said, "We can get the rice down after dinner, okay?  First dinner, then rice."  Then I waited for it. Only... it never happened. He sat there and thought about it for a minute then calmly asked for it again. This is what we have been waiting for. For Ayden to be able to keep his cool when he gets an answer he doesn't like so we can introduce compromises. I definitely wanted to reward his not throwing a fit so I said, "Ayden can play with the rice while Mommy cooks." Hoping that his vision for the activity did not have to involve me. He again took a minute to think about it, said, "Ses." (aka yes) and headed for the porch. I can see our side porch from the kitchen so we left the door open and he hung out out there with Mav while he quietly played with his rice and I finished dinner. 

After a few minutes he came running inside and held my leg. When I asked what happened, without skipping a beat he said, "Ha-pay" (aka airplane). 

We are crossing into some new and amazing territory. We are having simple conversations and are able to find some middle ground between his wants and ours. When he would go straight to tantrum mode, we had no choice but to follow through and leave our answer as no. Now that he is learning to keep his cool and asking nicely we are more than happy to meet him half way (within reason, of course). I just feel like this is a huge milestone and am so proud of Ayden for seeing a little bit of the bigger picture. 

Whenever David and I have discussed parenting teenagers, we always talked about how we don't want to be super strict parents. As long as our children are responsible, don't do anything to lose our trust and are respectful we want to be willing to hear them out and set expectations, curfews, and such according to what it is they are doing, who they will be with, etc. It seems as though those lines of communication are beginning to open up a little sooner than we thought. We are by no means out of the toddler woods but we can see that he is learning some wonderful things along the way!

~Sarah

Flashback!  Here is what we were up to one year ago today: "While They Are Sleeping"

Thank you for stopping by Life With the Ladniers!

Please take a second to:

 Subscribe via email, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter so you'll know as soon as a new post is up!

Miss seeing what Ayden is up to everyday?  Follow us on Instagram!

You can find all of the links in the sidebar.